


Crumble

by Charolastra



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Just a lot of angst and Pain, Other, Past Apprentice/Asra (The Arcana), Reader-Interactive, Red Plague (The Arcana), The Lazaret (The Arcana)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:54:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23172781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charolastra/pseuds/Charolastra
Summary: Not long after sending the apprentice to the lazaret, Asra, consumed by guilt and regret, goes to find them. He's too late.
Kudos: 18





	Crumble

_I made a mistake._

The boat ride to the island was perilous. Wind beat the water into foamy waves; into tall meringue towers of blue and white that slapped hungrily at the wooden sides. Asra couldn't afford to sit still. If he stopped paddling with the oars hooked to the rickety old boat, the sea would take them both. 

The Lazaret loomed in the distance, a short-term answer to a question Vesuvia dreaded. The island itself used to be a quaint picnic site for couples, families, and those seeking a quiet place to do work. Asra's chest filled to bursting with memories of the trees and birds that owned the place before the plague. 

Locks of curly white hair fell into his eyes. Asra swiped them away, fumbled to grab the oar again and pressed onward with a frustrated growl. The wind was freezing on his golden skin, but still perspiration dripped from the edge of his nose, off his jaw. 

_[Y/N_ ].

Asra had the suspicion he was too late before he even touched the shore. There was a sound like stones grinding together and a rumble in the boat as it touched the sandy beach, and Asra scrambled out onto the ground without bothering to bring the boat to a stop. Like a macabre snow storm, ash and dust fell around him in heavy clouds, dappling the water with silver; his palms, indented by the pebbles as he practically fell out of the boat, were so covered in grey that he couldn't see a fleck of his own skin beyond it. 

These were _people_.

Perhaps uselessly, Asra feverishly wiped his hands on his trousers. He succeeded only in smearing the grey along the cotton pants and rubbing it into the skin of his hands. It was soft like that, unnaturally so, even a bit damp with coolness.

Asra felt like vomiting. The ash spouted from the edifices' gigantic chimney was not that of firewood, he knew, but from coal, liquid accelerant, and human flesh. Every flake of silver had a particle of somebody in it, he knew, and his stomach twisted into furious knots at the thought. Many patients weren't even _confirmed_ _dead_ before the workers piled them into a cramped brick kiln with other bodies in various stages of decay. 

Why had he come? He knew what he would find in the basic sense, but now that he was here, eyes streaming as he tried not to breathe the debris, the whole scene was overpowering. The utter grief, the abandonment that oozed from the walls, from the sand–it hurt. It grabbed onto his heart with bony fingers and clawed desperately for a hold. Asra heaved himself to his feet, nose tucked into his elbow, heart pounding out of his chest.

The beach was stippled with raised piles of sand and ash–makeshift graves–where the morsels that hadn't burnt to nothing were discarded. Some of them were clearly fresh, within the hour. Others were days or weeks past. The peaks had been reduced by time to tiny dunes. [Y/N] was somewhere in one of those graves. 

The lanky magician remembered the moment he left [Y/N] with the boatswain like it had happened that same morning. It was only a week ago that he had to send them to the Lazaret at the suggestion of city officials.

"It's for the best," a burly old guard told him with a little squeeze of his shoulder. He watched, heartbroken, as the boat carrying his beloved apprentice turned into a speck on the horizon. "The sick go to quarantine so the rest of us can live." 

Asra tried so hard to fix it. He flushed [Y/N]'s tired eyes with clean water, fed them nutritious meals, made sure they drank all of the herbal tea remedies, even as their scleras stained blood red. They slept so deeply that Asra mistook them for a corpse more than once.

When they were awake, they cried. They had fevered nightmares where they called for Asra, even when he rushed to them and held them so tight, sometimes for hours until they finally stopped shaking and shouting. In their fleeting moments of lucidity, they begged Asra to help them, to use a spell, something, anything to ease the pain. The magician spent more magic in those hours than he ever had in all his years, trying and failing to find [Y/N] a shred of respite. Any sleep he did get was punctuated with fits of terror and grief–grief for someone who hadn't even died yet.

[Y/N] reached the inevitable last stage in less than three days. The coughing and crying was so loud that someone called the guards on their shop. Someone discovered the terminal [Y/N] cocooned in blankets. Took them away. As much as it hurt to put them under for the trip–and, sweet Arcana, did it hurt like a white-hot poker having to wave his hand and replace their hard-earned energy with fatigue–it hurt more to picture his apprentice clawing and fighting to stay. 

The magician compartmentalized, but there wasn't enough palm wine to drown the thought of his apprentice waking up in a room in the lazaret, surrounded by the dying, rubbing elbows with corpses that appeared much faster than could be disposed of, and knowing that Asra had betrayed them. _Abandoned_ them.

At the thought of that, just like he had in the moment, Asra turned to the side and retched painfully. He hadn't eaten in a day. Nothing but stomach acid flowed from his chapped lips onto the sand. His body ached with stress, exertion, exhaustion. 

But he came to find [Y/N]. That couldn't wait.

The doctors probably wouldn't let him inside the Lazaret, and truthfully, he didn't want to see the inside of it. He only wanted to know that [Y/N] wasn't among those scattered on the beach. With a massive effort, Asra closed his purple hued eyes, drew a snaking band of magic from his body, then sent it out over the beach. It hovered over a pile, seeming like a hound to sniff and search it, then repeated with the next pile. 

The first five had no trace of [Y/N], and neither did the five closest to the water. The white haired man was finally easing out of his panic, feeling like he could touch the ground, when the band slowly sank into one pile on the far side of the island and turned into a shimmering mist.

Like a drunken madman Asra took off, stumbling, kicking sand up behind him, until he was close enough to dive for the pile. He landed clumsily and started digging in the same manner, following the sad mist from the finding spell deeper into the sand. Without realizing it, he was already weeping. Fat tears fell onto the sand he swept away with his hands.

Whatever it was, it was far down. In a few minutes Asra had made a sizeable trench, as well as done serious damage to his hands, but the mist sank another couple of inches down before finally settling into an uneasy shuffling. 

There. Asra stopped, struck dumb, as his shredded and bloodied fingers uncovered a bleached white bone. The mist traced the smooth edges with a careful touch, confirming, silently, that it belonged to the one person. 

Sobbing now, Asra hurled handfuls of sand in a frenzy until he had exposed five more bones: two femurs and tibias, one section of rib bone. They crumbled to a gritty dust in his hands and mingled with the physical remnants of the searching spell. 

  
He found [Y/N]. 

Sweet Arcana, he wanted to know, but not like this. Not now. Not before he could tell them how _sorry_ he was for sending them away. Asra bit his lip so hard it, too, started to bleed, trying and failing to choral the wail of absolute agony in his throat. 

The surviving bones were so clean when he held them, contrasting his digits caked in bloody ash. Asra clutched them against his chest, falling backwards into the sand, hyperventilating as he hunched over them. His vision blurred with tears, with overwhelming despair. His hands shook so hard he almost dropped the remains. The bones further crumbled with every jostle. The magician's distressed breathing reached a fever pitch.

* * *

Inside the solid walls of the Lazaret, the few patients who were still well enough to sleep were jarred awake by the most miserable, most agonized, most grief stricken scream they'd ever heard. It pierced through the brick and cement that sealed them in. It gave even the nurses pause. It was over just as quick as it came, cut off like the sound had simply been ripped from the throat of its origin.


End file.
